Digital propaganda, political bots and polarized politics in India

The use of digital propaganda during crises and elections to manipulate public opinion, suppress dissent, and diminish activists’ voices has been increasingly witnessed in recent times in both developed and developing countries. Digital propaganda refers to the use of machines in addition to human users to interact with humans or run a campaign on the internet, computer and mobile devices designed to deliberately manipulate public opinion during crises or elections. While developing countries continue to have a limited internet base, this has not deterred political actors from integrating the internet into their propaganda strategies. Using Twitter data on two international conflicts between India and Pakistan – the Uri attack and the subsequent Surgical Strike – I show how online public opinion has been manipulated by a handful of sources that are driven by algorithms. Online public opinion has been able to enter the offline domain because of the contextual hybridity and the emergence of a hybrid media system. These findings reflect the limitations of public opinion in the digital age, and call attention to political polarization in the country. I discuss the need to integrate computational techniques with critical analysis of tweets and suspicious Twitter accounts to identify political bots online.